Nvidia could reportedly backstop $250B loan for new OpenAI data center campus

Word out of the Wall Street Journal is that Nvidia is in talks to backstop a $250 billion loan tied to a new OpenAI data center campus going up in Ohio. The site, according to CNBC, is expected to deliver 10 gigawatts of computing capacity — enough juice, roughly, to power eight million homes. That alone tells you this isn't a modest server room; it's an industrial-scale build.

The campus is being developed by SB Energy Inc., a SoftBank unit that took in $500 million from OpenAI last year and specializes in more than just data centers — it also builds energy infrastructure like battery storage. The company has a track record here: in 2024 it built a 900-megawatt solar park outside Austin to feed a Google data center. Now it's apparently scaling up for OpenAI.

Here's the twist, though. The $250 billion Nvidia is reportedly weighing to backstop only covers OpenAI's lease and some construction costs — not the actual chips that will run inside the facility. Add those in, and the total price tag could more than double, pushing past $500 billion. For scale, Meta's Hyperion campus in Louisiana, which offers half the computing capacity of this Ohio site and is expected to house up to 11 buildings, gives a sense of just how sprawling this Ohio project could end up being.

Which chips will actually go inside remains unconfirmed. But the Journal also reported that Nvidia is considering a separate deal to finance $350 billion worth of GPU purchases for OpenAI, which makes it awfully likely that Nvidia silicon ends up powering the site. Given that a 10-gigawatt buildout takes years, OpenAI probably won't be running today's chips there at all — more likely it's betting on Nvidia's future lineup, including the Rubin Ultra arriving in the second half of 2027 as part of a 72-accelerator Rubin Ultra NVL576 rack rated at 15 exaflops in NVFP4 format, more than four times the 3.5 exaflops Nvidia's current systems manage. After that comes Feynman in 2028, Nvidia's first chip family to use die stacking and custom high-bandwidth memory, with racks potentially holding as many as 1,152 GPUs — a jump of more than tenfold over today's Vera Rubin setups, made possible partly by switches using co-packaged optics to cut out costly transceiver chips.

And there's a SoftBank angle worth flagging. If Nvidia's backstop goes through, it would be a nice boost for SoftBank, which reportedly plans to take SB Energy public later this year at a valuation above $50 billion. Landing a quarter-trillion-dollar contract from OpenAI right before that IPO is the kind of headline number that tends to get investors' attention.